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Why Not Haskell?

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Re: Why Not Haskell?

#61

Post by SkyMarshal »

michaelochurch wrote: post #37
waqf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too painful. It could be that I hadn't learned the idioms well-enough to see a better way of doing things; but if I had trouble, I think it's fair to say that most people would. This. My current opinion as to what would constitute a perfect language is: something built on top of Haskell which wo…

Monads are not unreadable. When you finally get do-notation and realize that you can use the same idioms for (a) list comprehensions, (b) imperative-style programming, and (c) error-handling and option-chaining, there's a "Wow" moment. However, we can give up on selling monads to the masses. The name alone... The concept of the monad is beautiful and awesome, but it's too different to succeed with the masses.

>However, we can give up on selling monads to the masses. The name alone...

A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?

(for anyone not familiar with the in-joke: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3870088/a-monad-is-just-a...)

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#62

Post by eeperson »

radarsat1 wrote: post #25

I've been doing a whole lot of scientific Python lately, and every time I let my program run for like an hour only to crash on an array of the wrong dimensions, or pass in a scalar where an array is expected or vice versa, I swear and wish I was using a strongly typed language like Haskell. If only it had the same tools as SciPy I'd be all over doing my scientific work in Haskell. (Not to mention it would have faster…

It's not Haskell but its closer than Python. Have you seen Scalala for Scala:

https://github.com/scalala/Scalala

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#63

Post by Sniffnoy »

socratic wrote: post #9

If the question is, should we use Haskell to solve this problem, or should we use JavaScript, I can't imagine that the answer is often Haskell. (Maybe if the question is, should we use OCaml or should we use Haskell...) That said, what really came out of left field was the OP saying that he and his friends are more and more using Go. Is Go adoption happening? I'd love to have a systems programming language that isn't…

What I want to know is, is Go still undergoing major revisions? I don't seem to have been able to find an answer to this, and it's annoying. I remember there being some fairly big changes some time ago -- not so recently now, but after it was already public -- and I want to know whether that's going to still be happening before I bother learning it.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#64

Post by kisielk »

radarsat1 wrote: post #25

I've been doing a whole lot of scientific Python lately, and every time I let my program run for like an hour only to crash on an array of the wrong dimensions, or pass in a scalar where an array is expected or vice versa, I swear and wish I was using a strongly typed language like Haskell. If only it had the same tools as SciPy I'd be all over doing my scientific work in Haskell. (Not to mention it would have faster…

Sounds to me like you're doing it wrong. I write scientific Python code every single day for work and I (nor anyone else who works with me) never run in to those kinds of problems. Why are you running simulations that take an hour before you even know your code work? Where are your unit and integration tests? Every piece of our software stack has (or should have...) tests that verify all the bits fit together correctly in a matter of seconds or perhaps minutes tops.

Strong typing would be nice to have sometimes, but in practice I think it limits the amount of ad-hoc data analysis and exploration you can do while trying to piece together a piece of software. I think the scientists in our company would murder the software engineering team if they had to deal with strong typing to get things done.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#65

Post by yason »

michaelochurch wrote: post #3

Haskell is a hard language because (a) laziness is not intuitive, especially when space-performance matters (sadly, it does) and (b) pure functional programming is just not practical for most people. Like the OP said, it's awesome for brain-stretching, but not the easiest language to use. I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too pain…

By the way, what concrete benefits do you think lazy evaluation offers in contrast to lazy data structures?

I've noticed that with Clojure I can enjoy most laziness just the way I want to enjoy it by using lazy sequences and data structures. There's no lazy evaluation but I haven't really bumped into any problems with eager evaluation in Clojure. But Haskell goes deeper and has lazy evaluation as well. What additional, further good does it bring? (Besides nearly impossible debug prints...)

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#66

Post by boothead »

swah wrote: post #7

With the trend of SOA and webservers like Mongrel2, perhaps its a good time to start putting the more esoteric languages in production in the form of small services (w/ ZeroMQ for example).

Agreed, zmq and some form of cross language serialization library (we're using protocol buffers) is a seriously powerful tool to have in your box. There are some patterns that seem perfectly suited to a small piece of haskell at the end of a zmq socket.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#67

Post by malkia »

waqf wrote: post #12
michaelochurch wrote: post #3

Haskell is a hard language because (a) laziness is not intuitive, especially when space-performance matters (sadly, it does) and (b) pure functional programming is just not practical for most people. Like the OP said, it's awesome for brain-stretching, but not the easiest language to use. I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too pain…

> I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too painful. It could be that I hadn't learned the idioms well-enough to see a better way of doing things; but if I had trouble, I think it's fair to say that most people would. This. My current opinion as to what would constitute a perfect language is: something built on top of Haskell which wo…

Not entirely the same, but check Mozilla's rust (still in progress) - https://github.com/graydon/rust/wiki

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#68

Post by edsrzf »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #63
socratic wrote: post #9

If the question is, should we use Haskell to solve this problem, or should we use JavaScript, I can't imagine that the answer is often Haskell. (Maybe if the question is, should we use OCaml or should we use Haskell...) That said, what really came out of left field was the OP saying that he and his friends are more and more using Go. Is Go adoption happening? I'd love to have a systems programming language that isn't…

What I want to know is, is Go still undergoing major revisions? I don't seem to have been able to find an answer to this, and it's annoying. I remember there being some fairly big changes some time ago -- not so recently now, but after it was already public -- and I want to know whether that's going to still be happening before I bother learning it.

Go version 1, the first stable version of the language and implementation, is due out early next year. That sounds like a good time to start learning.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#69

Post by tikhonj »

kd1220 wrote: post #28

I'm learning Haskell right now. It's the most recent language I've decided to pick up since R back in 2006. Despite dabbling in Lisp about a decade ago, and the functional flavoring of R, it's been a pretty difficult ride. However, it's definitely teaching me to think about writing programs in a very different way. I can attest to the painfulness of the IO monad. I still haven't gotten it fully. The error messages ar…

I've found that the error messages quickly start making more sense (most of the time anyway...); in fact, now I parse the Haskell type error messages faster and more accurately than similar messages in Java or the like. I'm sufficiently spoiled now that error messages in languages like Python just throw me off completely...

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#70

Post by wladimir »

waqf wrote: post #12
michaelochurch wrote: post #3

Haskell is a hard language because (a) laziness is not intuitive, especially when space-performance matters (sadly, it does) and (b) pure functional programming is just not practical for most people. Like the OP said, it's awesome for brain-stretching, but not the easiest language to use. I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too pain…

> I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too painful. It could be that I hadn't learned the idioms well-enough to see a better way of doing things; but if I had trouble, I think it's fair to say that most people would. This. My current opinion as to what would constitute a perfect language is: something built on top of Haskell which wo…

Frankly, the code contains all the information you need to do this already, so perhaps we just need a source-code übereditor that marks it up so that you can see the dataflow.

Yes please! I'd love an uber-editor in which I can visualize the dataflow, control flow, and other static analysis output on-the-fly (for any language). Computers are fast enough to do it. It would aid in understanding and be a code maintainer's dream. Imagine that you change something and get immediate feedback on changes in control flow and data flow, and directly see if it was correct without going through any test cycle.

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